Wouldn’t golf be easier if we just picked up the little white ball, walked 400 yards and dropped it in the hole without hitting it with small sticks? Wouldn’t tennis be easier without a net in the middle? Why run an ultra-marathon when you could just walk or drive from A to B? Why spend years learning to play piano when you could just type a prompt and generate piano music at the click of a button? Why spend 9 months of my life making a graphic novel that no one will publish or anyone but a few people in my inner circle will ever read?

Maybe because ‘efficiency’ doesn’t always matter. Maybe because it’s fun. We have, as a species, for a very long time voluntarily attempted to overcome unnecessary obstacles (as Bernard Suits so eloquently put it).

In a market context, inefficiency is to be removed at all costs. They reward cheaper & faster. In a market, unnecessary obstacles are a problem to be solved. In a market, there is no tennis, or golf, or piano playing, and ultra-marathons have no value.

If we want evidence of the universality of our love for voluntarily overcoming unnecessary obstacles, we need only look to amateur play in every country and place on earth – the local sports clubs, chess clubs, board games clubs, music groups and yes, even artists.

Out beyond the market, we are happy. We play.

It’s easy to give a client what they want. Ask and they’ll tell you. They’ll give you the dimensions, the budget, the timeline. They’ll tell you which colours they like or don’t like; which ones are ‘right’. They’ll tell you what your work should be about and when it’s achieving that or not. If it’s wrong, it’s easy to fix. Just do another version, nudge it closer to what the client wants until they’re satisfied.

Much more difficult is the work one does for oneself. When there is no one to tell you what is working or not working, what’s right and what’s wrong. When no one tells you the dimensions, or instructs how much time you’re supposed to spend on, how much money you’re supposed to use to make it. It’s difficult to know when the work you made for yourself is done – it’s all on you. It’s also the best type of work.

The problem with participating in any race to the bottom is that you end up there.

Complex, detailed work takes time, attention, energy and labour. When we see something that is complex, we tend to be able to recognise it as such, even if we know nothing about it. Aeroplanes, computers, grand buildings are all amazing feats of human ingenuity even though most of us don’t have a clue about how these things actually work. We admire the person or people who spent all that time, effort, attention and money on making such a complex thing.

Simplicity, on the other hand, also takes time, attention, energy and labour. But, the effort, restraint, and experience required to know how to reduce, declutter, and clarify is often greater than that required to add, enhance, and complicate. Not always, but quite often. A master-crafted knife, air-conditioning you don’t think about unless it’s broken or simple on/off light switch. When a sauce is reduced, there is less of it, but the flavours are intensified.

I enjoy complexity, but I love simplicity.

Did you see that video with the cat doing the thing with the food? Or how about that waterskier who crash landed? Or what about that snow monkey in Japan who stole the phone and took it in the thermal spring with them? Or how about the life hack for growing your own cactus? Or that interview where someone got owned?

The online world is increasingly saturated with bite-sized nuggets of attention-grabbing triviality. And if that trough is the basis for our intellectual diet, it doesn’t seem to bode well for the things I value most – deep thought, detailed work, and nuance.

So, I’ve stopped feeding from the trough and, I have to say, it’s taken a while, but my brain is changing back: my attention is more focussed, I can read longer, think more deeply, and most importantly, the art I’m making is feeling more and more like me. No regrets.

In agriculture, almost everyone knows that monocultures are bad (the Potato Famine is a prime example, although there are many others). Diversity improves the resilience of crops – it makes them less susceptible to a single point of failure (like a single insect or bacteria that could wipe out a monoculture). We don’t seem to see ourselves as a bunch of potatoes, though, do we?

And yet, wouldn’t our individual illustration practices be more resilient if we could do more than one style or work in more than one medium? Most illustrators I know ‘diversify’ their income through selling products (brushpacks or art prints), teach workshops or do school talks/visits. Their income is more resilient because of it.

So, wouldn’t our collective practise be stronger if we had more illustrators doing different types of work within it – more ‘competition’ – including generative AI? More examples of what a person doesn’t want so when they come across someone like you they see that you’re perfect for the job?

Imagine a world where all illustrators produced all the same stuff? It would become so easy to mimic a computer could do it. A lack of diversity makes illustrators and potatoes vulnerable. Why would we want to stop it?

In a world where technology companies are here to ‘generate content’ on behalf of a human so that we perceive life to be more convenient and they make more money, making something yourself, from scratch, is an act of defiance.

Humans do more than ‘generate content’… we compose music, we invent new ways to see the world, we write to build bridges of empathy and connection between us. If we begin to believe that all we do is ‘generate content’ as ‘content creators’, we’ve already lost.

Social media needs the world watching. Success for social media platforms is a higher engagement rate, higher retention rate, more visits, more refreshes, longer sessions. And, as it optimises for this (to the benefit shareholders and investors in these platforms), the content we create, as creators, changes.

We are becoming complicit in addiction. Like a rodent that gets a treat if it presses the right button, platforms ‘influence the influencers’ to create content that brings them more likes, more views, more shares. In reality, what it’s doing is training us to create stuff from which people cannot look away – to keep others scrolling and not creating. Creators learn how to create ‘stories’ or ‘reels’ that hook people – that tap into a part of our brains that don’t let us look away. An exercise in perpetual micro-suspense. A still image is no longer enough.

And whilst these platform may parade as ‘harmless modern-day marketing’ or ‘just the way it is now’, I can’t help but wonder what it’s really doing to our brains; how our dopamine response is being toyed with – slowly desensitising us so that we learn to crave and create ‘content’ and life experiences that amplifies the response further; not just in the digital world, but in the real world to. A world where quiet repetition, introspection, and reflection – those things that true art needs most – are pushed aside by the junkie-type habit we’re pushing on ourselves.

I don’t know where it goes, but I won’t be watching. I’ll be making.

I used to tell people that I was a software designer with a ‘second job’ as an illustrator; ‘software designer by day, illustrator by night.’ I used to think that the illustration work was a creative and artistic salve for the days spent toiling on computers – a way to reset my mental health and to build up my energy for when it was time to return to work on Monday.

Now I tell people I’m an artist who needs a second job as a software designer so I can support myself and my art practice. Putting the art practice first is a profound shift in identity I never saw coming. But that’s the thing with practicing art – it helps you learn about who you really are and what you really care about. It turns out that the market doesn’t pay for things I care about, but I’ll make them anyway.

Good commercial kitchens run like well-oiled machines and some of that comes down to the french term, “Mis en place” or “putting in place”. The idea that before one cooks, the kitchen utensils and ingredients should be organised in a way that makes the cooking process efficient and allows the chef to do their best work. At the end of a dinner service, part of the ‘cleaning’ process is the preparation for tomorrow – putting it all back in its place.

Good art studios are like good commercial kitchens; there is almost no bigger barrier to starting a process of creation for me than misplacing the pencils, the paper, the paints, the erasers which I use to make marks. The process of making is also far more stressful if, halfway through a watercolour wash, I can’t locate the towel I need to do some mopping up, or the right brush to finish the job in the moment.

There is no right way to organise this stuff of course, and I’m always evolving, but it’s a useful reminder – when the day is done, mis en place.